This November, Notting Hill will gain a coffee house and bakery that might just become part of your west London pastry pilgrimage. Sit With Us is the latest project by Polina Sychova and Eugene Korolev, the duo behind the neighbourhood’s Michelin Guide-recommended modern Ukrainian restaurant Sino.
Coffee is central to Sit With Us – and alongside the usual flat whites, espressos, filter coffees and rotating selection of single-origin beans you’d expect from a specialist coffee house, the duo is planning on getting more experimental. “We wanted to show that exceptional everyday coffee can sit alongside more creative, unexpected drinks, within a brand and space built to bring people together,” Sychova said in a statement.
Facilitating this boundary-pushing approach to coffee will be an off-site laboratory dedicated to coffee. Here, the team will be experimenting with cold extraction, clarification, infusion, fermentation and carbonation, and creating house-made syrups, foams and extracts. A signature drink will be the Buckwheat Cloud, made with toasted buckwheat, espresso, dark chocolate and cultured cream; the Cherry Soda will blend cherries with cold-pressed coffee. Non-coffee drinkers are catered to with drinks like the Mandarin, Basil & Hojicha tea, combining roasted Japanese green tea with fresh basil, mandarin and toasted soybean kinako cream foam.
And to eat? The in-house bakery will have a global approach to flavour, with pastries like a poppyseed and sour cherry pain Suisse, buckwheat miso caramel kouign-amann, and apple and dulce de leche danishes. There’ll also be a selection of sourdoughs, dark rye breads and more.
The breakfast menu will feature comforting favourites like baked apple and brown butter porridge and soft-boiled eggs with rye toast and whipped butter. And at lunch, there’ll be a selection of sandwiches, salads and a house-made daily broth.
The pair hopes that Sit With Us will become a place for connection and collaboration. There are plans for weekend DJ coffee mornings, bakery tastings and more community events. In designing the space, Sychova – who also designed restaurant interiors for Sino, Oudh 1722, Spring Street and Pyro – wanted to keep things sleek and contemporary yet warm; this equals stainless steel and neutral finishes alongside softer timbers and a pale blue colour palette.
While Sychova (who grew up in Kyiv) leads the creative vision and interior design for Sino and Sit With Us, Dnipro-born Korolev leads the culinary direction, having passed through numerous European Michelin-starred restaurants and representing Ukraine in the Culinary Olympics. In February 2022, Korolev left his restaurant to volunteer for the Ukrainian army, with which he fought with until September 2023. Later that year, he met Sychova, and together they formed the vision for Sino. Last week, the restaurant’s senior sous chef won the UK regional final of the S Pellegrino Young Chef Academy Competition 2026–27.
Sit With Us will open in November at 2a Chepstow Road, W2 5VJ.
